


Convalescence

by Smirkdoctor (orphan_account)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Medical Realism, Missing Scenes, The Final Problem, realistic injury recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 19:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14119617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Smirkdoctor
Summary: In reality, it wasn’t as simple as “Boop, they’re fine.”Sherlock, John, and Mycroft recover from the explosion in The Final Problem...and the emotional damage wrought at Sherrinford island.





	Convalescence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DiscordantWords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/gifts).



The bomb-bearing drone floated into Baker Street, bringing with it the haunting, sweetly evil singing of a child.

John Watson didn’t understand, so he looked to Sherlock Holmes, just as he always did when something in this life he had chosen just didn’t fit. Just moments ago, he’d been accepted into the Holmes family as Mycroft laid the horrible history of their long lost sister out into the case-space of 221B Baker Street.

As the drone settled into the middle of the worn sitting room rug, John smiled crookedly with the realization that Eurus’s first contact with her brother in thirty some years had been through him. So it would seem that even the estranged Holmes recognized his position as Sherlock’s companion, a member of the family.

John listened to Sherlock and Mycroft quietly discuss the logistics of a “patience grenade,” then closed his eyes, recalling his military training:

_Three seconds to detonation._

_Seek open air to reduce the effect of the concussive force of the explosion._

_Land softly and roll if possible._

_As soon as possible, complete a primary survey to assess for life-threatening injuries._

He breathed out, opened his eyes, and brought himself back into the room. Based on their relative positions, he and Sherlock stood the best chance of avoiding injury by going out the front windows.

John had a hundred memories of looking out those windows: monitoring for clients, reading their worries in their vacillations on the pavement prior to entering; watching as hopeful patrons left their first meeting with London’s greatest detective; sensing the relieved sadness of loved ones after cases of loss had finally been laid to rest.

One last memory hit him more strongly than any of the others. In it, he caught Mary’s smiling eyes as she approached the stoop. Rosie was harnessed to her chest, arms flailing with glee.

He exhaled in a whoosh. _Rosie_. Jesus.

Just that second, in a demonstration of their repaired near-telepathic communication, Sherlock asked Mycroft to lend John his phone to send a “just-in-case” message of love to his daughter.

The gesture was fruitless. Any attempt at a goodbye message to a one-year-old would be. As impossible as attempting to express his anguish as he held his dying wife, as futile as his efforts to dispel the crowd gathered around his best friend’s body so he could grieve love lost before it was found.

John closed his eyes again, swallowed his fear and sadness, and focused instead on the adrenaline surge. He’d thrived in dangerous situations before. He must simply survive one more.

For his daughter. For the men next to him.

For his family.

The three men listened to Mrs. Hudson move out of danger one floor below, counting down to the frenetic movements that could very well be their last. With one last glance at Sherlock, John pivoted and pushed off his left foot, bounding toward the window and Baker Street beyond.

~*~*~*~

He jerked forward with the force of the explosion. But, moving his eyes right and left, John saw only darkness.

That made no sense. Why would he jump from a blast with closed eyes? Come to that, why was the surface beneath him soft and warm instead of the cool hardness of concrete?

As his brain scrambled to make the necessary connections, he felt himself surface into wakefulness. He forced his eyes open and saw a flat white surface ten feet above his head.

He tried to turn his face to the side, to see where Sherlock had landed after their jump, but the stabbing pain through the muscles above his eyes convinced him to stay still. Instead, he took stock of his body, his eyes darting across the ceiling then down to his limbs.

There was a right antecubital IV dripping a clear substance into his veins. He flexed that hand cautiously and winced as his scraped palm refused to stretch, then hissed a bit as the damaged skin of his arm dragged over the bedsheet.

His left hand and arm felt heavy and, when he tried to lift the limb to his face, his bone-deep weakness combined with lancing pain convinced him that it should just stay put. He glanced down instead, sucking in a breath as he saw the splint.

Right, then. A wrist fracture. And, based on his headache and loss of consciousness, a probable concussion.

Pretty severe road rash on his palms and the ventral surface of his forearms. He didn’t hear any monitor alarms or ventilators, so he didn’t seem to be in intensive care. A stroke of luck, that.

He used his less-injured right hand to remove the annoyingly dry air flowing through his nasal cannula and tried to recall exactly what happened.

~*~*~*~

He remembered crossing his arms protectively over his face as he threw himself through the glass. The shattering sound and the pain of glass and wood fragments slapping against his unprotected hands were quickly subsumed by the overpressure wave.

A cacophony deafened him as the pressure and heat from the ignition of the compressed air of the flat hit him from behind. He felt intense heat and a flash of burning pain across the back of his neck and hands before the explosive force of the explosion threw his head forward.

The momentum of his jump combined with that of the explosion ensured that he cleared Speedy’s canopy and outdoor seating. He landed soft on flexed knees, but overbalanced into a rather spectacular skidding fall on his outstretched hands.

His left side, always stronger, took the majority of the force as he sprawled forward onto the kerb. He felt a pop and a deep, throbbing pain as his distal radius and ulna fractured. The skin of his palms shredded as they slid across the concrete.

Inertia finally released its hold on his body, and John moaned and laid his throbbing head against his uninjured right wrist. He only intended to rest for a moment before pulling himself to his feet and tending to his partner.

But that didn’t happen, because from the moment he let his head rest, John Watson knew nothing but darkness.

~*~*~*~

“...so worried about you. A broken arm, a concussion, burns everywhere…” Martha Hudson bounced Rosie on her knees at his bedside as she squealed and reached for him. “But even so, we knew you were going to wake eventually…”

John’s mind supplied the end of that sentence: “... _unlike Sherlock_.” He shuddered internally at the implication. Just how badly had his friend been injured?

He couldn’t bring himself to even ask that question, so instead he cleared his throat and reached his right hand out to Rosie’s grasp. “How long was I out?”

Martha worried at the bow on her blouse and glanced at the clock. “Well, you were unconscious when I got out of the building. You came around a bit when I called to you, and they say you had your eyes open during the ambulance ride. And during the splinting.” She nodded at his left arm. “Do you not remember?”

John shook his head gently, then hissed in a breath and closed his eyes as bolts of electric pain zinged across his forehead and down both sides of his skull.

“They mentioned that might happen. Post-concussive amnesia, I think they said?” She looked to John for confirmation and seemed to take it from the turned-down edges of his mouth. “Anyhow, once they medicated you for pain and got you into a bed, you passed out again. That was about nineteen hours ago.”

John swallowed, considering. An entire day had passed since the explosion. And, judging from the frown on his landlady’s face, the staff still didn’t know if or when Sherlock would regain consciousness.

He let go of Rosie’s hand and reached for his call button.

“Oh, dear. If there’s something you need, you can just send me to get it...” Martha began, but John shook his head again, this time barely feeling the pain.

“No,” John declared solemnly, looking toward the door and anticipating the argument he was about to have with his nurse. “I need to see Sherlock.”

~*~*~*~

John walked into Sherlock’s room, bracing himself on the IV pole that he had initially scoffed at. _Really, how much insensible fluid loss had he suffered through his damaged skin? Was a constant infusion of lactated ringer’s solution absolutely necessary?_

But he had come to rely on its support as he shuffled down the long hallway to intensive care. He fought hard against the lightheadedness that could have come from any number of bodily ills: concussion, dehydration… possibly a subdural hematoma, as his doctor suspected. He had promised to lay peacefully through a series of brain MRIs in exchange for five minutes with his friend.

Any resentment at the maneuvering he had undertaken disappeared as he surveyed the equipment crowding Sherlock’s small room. His physician’s eyes rapidly catalogued the probable injuries and how they fit with the timeline of the explosion.

Sherlock was intubated, with a faster than average breathing rate programmed into his ventilator. The head of his bed was elevated, and he had two IV poles piled with bags flowing into large intravenous lines in both arms. That meant a head injury leading to severe concussion and increased intracranial pressure...maybe even a hemorrhage.

John assumed that Sherlock had experienced a concussion from the blast wave as well, but his impact with the ground must have been quite a bit more traumatic than John’s.

A chest tube peeked out from its dressing on the left side of his ribcage. _Pneumothorax, then._ John thought. Probably due to a broken rib, although with Sherlock’s smoking history, it could simply be from blunt trauma. In either case, there was probably a pulmonary contusion involved as well.

The right side of the detective’s pale face was covered with blackish purple bruising and a small dressing rested a few centimeters above his ear on a shaved patch of his scalp. Bandages covered the road rash and thermal burns John presumed were covering his hands and lower arms.

“Oh God,” John muttered, not realizing he spoke aloud until the nurse who was checking on the drip rate of one of the bags of fluid looked up. She cast worried glances at Sherlock and John in turn.

“Still touch and go, love. Three fractured ribs from where he hit that step, decreased oxygen saturation due to the pneumothorax, and we’re overbreathing him to decrease the intracranial pressure from the brain bleed and the contre-coup injury.”

Shit. John thought, but he nodded then asked, with a small, inadequate hand gesture, “Can I…?”

The nurse looked down at her clipboard and sighed, then met his eyes. John tried not to see the unspoken pity there as she bit her lower lip and tipped her head toward Sherlock in a gesture of invitation. “You have five minutes. I’ll leave the two of you be for a bit.”

He fought the urge to say something along the lines of _It’s not like that._ or _We’re not...we’ve never…_ Obviously, the time for defensive half-truths had passed. He met the nurse’s eye and nodded his thanks.

John choked back a sob as he reached the side of Sherlock’s bed and covered the detective’s hand with his own. He squeezed gently as he shut his eyes and prayed...maybe to God, maybe to Sherlock.

“Please wake up.”

He tried not to think about the last time he had seen Sherlock bruised and battered in a hospital bed, shivering with pain and withdrawal. He didn’t want to remember the days spent in shifts at his bedside, waiting for the drug haze and then the danger of kidney failure to pass, the guilt at his contributions to the injuries nearly overwhelming.

But the memories were all too fresh, and John collapsed into the visitor’s chair as silent tears began to fall down his cheeks.

“ _Please_ , Sherlock…just one more miracle.”

~*~*~*~

Sherlock did regain consciousness, just under 50 hours after the explosion. As he awoke, he smiled at the quiet murmuring of John reading to Rosie. He must have dosed off on the sofa in the sitting room again.

But upon opening his eyes, he saw the pair sitting at the foot of his bed. In his confusion, he reached out toward them, giving up as he realizes just how pinned down he was. He looked around and deduced his situation: IV drip of hypertonic saline— _a head wound;_ a chest tube— _clamped only about ten minutes previously, no blood evident—pneumothorax;_  high-flow oxygen through his nasal cannula— _obvious_.

_How tedious._

He attempted to voice his complaints and stopped, flinching at the feeling of an abraded throat. _Recently extubated, oropharyngeal damage from the endotracheal tube._ He quickly ran his tongue along his teeth and was relieved to find that none had been knocked out by an overzealous paramedic during intubation.

He shifted his torso a bit, trying to find a comfortable resting position, and brought his fingers to rest against his chin, preparing to assess how he obtained each of these injuries...and what the three of them were going to do about Eurus.

Suddenly John was standing just beside him, Rosie sitting wide-eyed in the chair at his feet. She clapped her chubby hands and squealed hello to her “Sher!” John’s eyes seemed to glisten as he rested his unsplinted hand over Sherlock’s with a pressure that felt familiar in a hazy, dream-like way.

 _But we don’t do...this._ Sherlock thought as he regarded the intimate gesture. John squeezed his hand and cleared his throat, then whispered, “Thank God you’re still here.”

Sherlock watched as he swallowed back tears and covered a slight sniff with a glance back at his daughter. “Rosie can’t lose another parent.”

Sherlock felt moisture gather in his own eyes in response. With the reassurance of his best friend by his side, his mind whirred into action analyzing Eurus’s message. His own family was fractured, perhaps irreparably, along fault lines created in his childhood.

Just before he disappeared deep into his own mind, he thought he heard John murmur, “ _I_ can’t lose you again.”

~*~*~*~

“And how is my dear brother getting along?” Sherlock asked a few hours later. Rosie was sitting on John’s lap, throwing Cheerios toward him and laughing.

John glanced at the cane he had asked Mrs Hudson to bring from home—the crutch that had marked him as a broken, purposeless soldier when he met Sherlock. The same one this infuriating but brilliant man had somehow known would serve in the takedown of Culverton Smith.

He was planning on gifting it to the elder Holmes brother as a gesture of goodwill. He would drop it off at his bedside later today...not that it would be of use to Mycroft in the near future.

As Mycroft hadn’t had the benefit of an open-air escape from the detonation, his injuries were even more severe than Sherlock’s. Both of his eardrums ruptured when the pressure wave hit, and he was knocked unconscious as he collided with the wall of the landing between the ground and first floor of Baker Street.

His expensive Italian leather shoes got tangled in the staircase spires, resulting in spiral fractures of his left tibia and fibula. The breaks in those bones allowed his leg to twist at such an angle that even Greg Lestrade, who was quite used to grisly crime scenes, had to turn away and empty his stomach at the sight.

That same spiral fracture was the current complicating feature of Mycroft’s recovery. His left lower extremity was splinted securely, but the surgical team was waiting to operate until the swelling subsided. John shook his head slightly and prepared to tell Sherlock that just that day, Mycroft had almost lost the limb to compartment syndrome.

When John arrived at Mycroft’s room later, holding the cane in one hand and a Toblerone in the other (based on Sherlock’s tip that they were Mycroft’s guilty pleasure), he saw that he had been beaten to the punch by Greg Lestrade.

The two men’s heads were inclined together, and they were engaged in a quiet, serious conversation. Greg cradled Mycroft’s hand between his own, his strong face displaying concern and affection.

John stepped back from the door with a smile, unwrapped and broke off a piece of the Toblerone, and headed back to Sherlock’s room to share the sweet… and the gossip.

~*~*~*~

On the day following his discharge and a full two weeks after the explosion, Sherlock visited Mycroft during physical therapy. He snorted to see his officious sibling wobbling on crutches, his casted leg bumping against the metal, and Mycroft acknowledged his presence with tilted chin and raised eyebrow. “Brother mine?”

“We survived,” Sherlock said.

“To fight another day,” Mycroft responded.

“We must defeat our common enemy to protect our crew.”

Mycroft placed a solemn hand over his heart. “Honor among pirates.”

Sherlock tapped the ground with something behind his back, then moved that arm in front of his body to reveal Mycroft’s umbrella.

Hooking it onto a nearby IV pole, Sherlock cut his eyes to his brother. “Each man shall keep his piece, cutlass, and pistols at all times clean and ready for action.”

Mycroft nodded and Sherlock smiled, small but warm, then turned to walk toward the exit. At this, Mycroft began his next attempt at a clumsy, shambling walk.

Hearing his muttered curses, Sherlock stopped at the door and threw over his shoulder, “You’ve never been a fan of legwork, but this is a touch extreme. What will you do with all your idle time?”

“I shall, perhaps, return to planning invasions of small nations.”

“Or prison islands.”

~*~*~*~

The brothers had ample time for planning, as even after his discharge, Mycroft was forced to observe six weeks of non-weight-bearing status before his cast was removed. But as soon as he was free, the three men deployed what turned out to be an idealistic, overly simplistic scheme for dealing with their secret sister.

If the grenade blast showed them the physical power Eurus held over them, surely the twisted machinations of the Sherrinford morality game were just as damaging emotionally.

~*~*~*~

Mycroft found himself taken down several pegs, his decades-long charade of power within his family crumbling along with Sherlock’s assumption of greater responsibility.

He no longer used his umbrella purely for pomp and circumstance. He purchased several more heavy-duty brollies and found that he leaned on them more and more at the end of long days of diplomacy, when his tired muscles ached from the effort of avoiding left foot drop due to the minor nerve injury from the fracture.

His hearing also recovered slowly, leaving him with intrusive and annoying tinnitus that meant his aloofness toward the inane conversation that so often surrounded him was no longer an affectation. This impediment along with the the small brainstorm hemorrhage that left him with utterly horrible headaches made him a bit less quick mentally.

Not quite as slow as Sherlock, granted, but it was still a hardship.

~*~*~*~

And what of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, the great detective and his intrepid blogger? They were largely physically unharmed, and their respective statuses in career and family matters were only bolstered. Emotionally, though, the marks of repeated, brutal trauma ran deep.

Sherlock channeled much of his pain into music, using the violin as a bridge to reach his now-mute sister. And the lessons she taught him about celebrating love and avoiding loss served him well in enriching his relationship with John and his daughter. No longer was the Work paramount and sentiment abhorrent. His family was now the thing.

As for John...he was slow to trust again. In the time after Sherrinford and the horrific revelations about Victor Trevor’s short life and cold, lonely death, he wondered how Eurus had entertained herself during their weeks of recovery.

Did she, like Mycroft, have unrestricted access to Britain’s CC-TV? Did she position the hospital security cameras to track every visitor to the Holmes brothers’ rooms? Had she laughed at the funny game she was playing?

Had she watched as John, with tired eyes, dragging feet, and Rosie strapped to his chest, wiped away tears after Sherlock awoke? Did she cock her head to the side in puzzlement at his all-too-human display of emotion, making a note to use him against Sherlock in her island torture experiment?

Were Mycroft’s injuries adequate, or did she wish for him to suffer more?

Was she the one who finally talked the doctors into giving Sherlock opioids for his pain?

For the love of God, did he actually pass her in the hallway, in disguise as a nurse in whites, hidden in plain site by a severe bun, brown eyes, and a surgical face mask?

He still shivered a bit, thinking about it. Thoughts of the risk, the violation, the lack of privacy under which he had been operating since he met Sherlock were nearly impossible to overcome. It was humiliating and terrifying to consider just how far Eurus’s influence had reached, how much she had played with their lives.

Each time he greeted Sherlock on his return from a Sherrinford visit, John felt incredible relief that they were both safe. In the midst of one homecoming embrace, John gave in and left a lingering kiss on Sherlock’s cheek.

And so the two men found comfort, as ever, in each other. Bolstered by their new intimacy, they found the energy to take on the world, just the two of them. And Rosie, of course.

Like always, but different.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for DiscordantWords’s winning bid in my Fandom Trumps Hate auction. They asked for a medically realistic take on the events of The Final Problem. If you want to know more about the specific injuries, most should have pretty good google results, and nothing is too medically explicit, with the possible exception of Mycroft’s fracture and compartment syndrome.
> 
> Thanks to Janto321 for emotional support and beta badassery.
> 
> And thanks to *you* for reading!


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